Jared Harris has been making waves on the small screen thanks to his role as the stiff-upper-lipped Englishman Lane Pryce in Mad Men. On a break from AMC's phenomenally successful '60s series, Jared snagged the coveted role of Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Ahead of the DVD and Blu-ray release of his horror film The Ward, we got on the phone with Jared to chat about how he sees Holmes and Moriarty's rivalry in Robert Downey Jr. and Guy Ritchie's highly-anticipated blockbuster sequel.

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We're going to see you as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows later this year. What's your take on Moriarty and Holmes's rivalry?
"Well I can't really give too much away because they want to keep all the plot details a secret so I can't say anything about that. I will say we've had long talks about how to achieve something that... he's a very famous character and he actually only appears in two stories of Sherlock Holmes, but he's talked about a lot. Since then he's a character or type of character that's been imitated so much. He was the first literary supervillain and supervillains are so well-known now that Mike Myers can do a comedy spoof about them. It's very easy to drift into parody."

What do you hope you bring to the role?
"My thing was, I just never wanted to explain myself. There's always that scene where the villain has to tell you what he's doing and why he's doing it. Guy luckily agreed with me and so did Robert. Why? Why do we need that? You're not going to explain yourself or what you're doing. There's a sort of arrogance about the character that's similar to Sherlock Holmes. They're both incredibly intelligent people, they're chess masters thinking many moves down the line. They don't know all of their opponents moves but they've got a lot of them. They're 20 moves ahead on their own plan. I just always wanted to create a sense that he had something else up his sleeve. As you unfold the story there's another step involved."

Is it a challenge to make him seem believable?
"You want him to seem believable but there's a certain element of villainey, he isn't just a bad school teacher. He's an evil villainous person otherwise he's not worth stopping. As soon as you know what the villain is doing you lose interest in the character and as soon as they state their purpose the tension goes out of the character. So often in these movies the bad guy appears as a theatrical villain, he ends up telling you what he's done or what he's going to do. Like a play you can't move the scenery around so you're describing events you're never going to see."

Why do you think that happens so much?
"That happens in movies because they aren't going to spend the screen time or production dollars on showing you something about this character. That's why they come across as being 'stagey'. They talk more and in films the person who talks less tends to be the stronger character. I watched Mission: Impossible with Philip Seymour Hoffman and he really never tells you what he's doing in that story and I just thought it was a very smart way of doing it."

Is the door open for you to appear in more Sherlock Holmes movies?
"I can't tell you that! I'm sure they're going to make more Sherlock Holmes films, though. I've no idea if I'll be in them."

The Ward is released on DVD and Blu-ray in October. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens on December 16.